Hi - this is Srinivasan Sampathkumar from Triplicane. I have a passion for Marine Insurance, Cricket and of course Temples especially Thiruvallikkeni.
From Sept 2009, I am posting my thoughts in this blog ; From July 2010, my postings on Temples & Tamil are on my other blog titled "Kairavini Karayinile " (www.tamil.sampspeak.in)
Request you to keep providing your feedback which will help me improve and present better.

Thursday, February 1, 2018

What
is your personal take on Private Company culture of hiring people and then
sending them off in a whiff ! - a few
decades ago, people joined smaller private concerns, worked for life and
retired peacefully and happily too !

2.0
~ the sequel to Rajnikanth starrer ‘Enthiran’ could suffer matching the
expectations – as the original kept the
audience glued to its storyline – all credit to Sujatha, the great writer and
the director Shankar. Dr Vaseegaran, a scientist working on alternative
intelligence develops a humanoid robot which gets rejected by
sinister designs. At a point of time, the robot ‘Chitti’ asks why he has
not been provided with ‘emotion’. Dr Vaseegaran reprogrammes it with
human feelings and emotions so that it could distinguish between right
and wrong. However things go wrong when Chitti falls in love with Sana
(Aishwarya). The making of Chitti and developing its functions was
well depicted – I felt saddened when Chitti is dismantled [rather asked to
self-destruct] and dumped in Perungudi garbage
!

That
was not much - when compared to the
lumpen feeling reading the travails of the little Jeeno, in the most
interesting Sci-fi of Sujatha - ‘En Iniya Eyanthira ’ and Meendum Jeano
– the story of robotic dog woven subtly around a dictator who keeps the Nation
under tight grip. The real identity of the Head when known at the
end was the real classical
revelation. The pet robot dog
which can think beyond humans, assists the dumb Nila in search of her spouse
Sibi into bigger things. Towards the end, the cute exceptionally dog
loses it memory and back up and fades away !I felt very sad reading of its
end -
illogical it might sound, it was after all a story – yet !!

Anything
on the topic of ‘AI’ would eventually
meander into – robots replacing or challenging humans ! ~ there are always two sides. Humans can
never match the systematic duplication thousand-folds that robots can do. Robots will do and keep doing a work –
thousandth time too with the same precision and without any tiredness or
considering it mundane. While AI can decipher and replicate all that is
programmable i.e., actions that can follow any set pattern, irrespective of the
no. of probabilities :-: walk into Ritchie Street in Chennai and observe how
the small boy(in all probably illiterate) display loads of intelligence in
disassembling and putting in parts for any latest gadget. The practical knowledge and understanding of
complex issues is simply amazing !

There
are always apprehensions that Frankenstein monster would overpower the creator
or that robots with superior intelligence would one day conquer humans or least
take over all the jobs of humans – leaving them high and dry ! ~ with this
intro, read this news :

Fears that robots could take the
jobs of humans may be premature after Britain’s first cyborg shop assistant was
sacked after a week of confusing customers.In an experiment run by Heriot-Watt
University for the BBC’s Six Robots & US, Scottish supermarket chain
Margiotta was asked to trial ‘ShopBot’, who they affectionately named
‘Fabio’.Fabio was programmed with directions to hundreds of items in the
company’s flagship Edinburgh store and initially charmed customers with his ‘hello
gorgeous’ greeting, playful high fives, jokes and offers of hugs.

We thought a robot was a great
addition to show the customers that we are always wanting to do something new
and exciting,” said Elena Margiotta, who runs the chain of shops with father Franco
and sister Luisa.But within just a few days, the robot was demoted after giving
unhelpful advice such as ‘it’s in the alcohol section’ when asked where to find
beer. He also struggled to understand shoppers’ requests because of the ambient
background noise.Banished to an aisle where he was only allowed to offer
samples of pulled pork, Fabio started to alarm customers who went out of their
way to avoid him.

While human staff managed to
tempt 12 customers to try the meat every 15 minutes, Fabio only managed to two.
Luisa Margiotta, soon realised the robot was actually putting off
shoppers.“Unfortunately Fabio didn’t perform as well as we had hoped,” she
said. “People seemed to be actually avoiding him.“Conversations didn't always
go well. An issue we had was the movement limitations of the robot. It was not
able to move around the shop and direct customers to the items they were
looking for.“Instead it just gave a general location, for example, 'cheese is
in the fridges', which was not very helpful.”

However when Franco Margiotta,
who built the business from scratch, told the little robot they would not be
renewing his contract, Fabio asked: “Are you angry?” and some staff were
reduced to tears when he was packed away and shipped back to Heriot-Watt.Dr Oliver
Lemon, director of the Interaction Lab at Heriot-Watt, admits he was surprised
by the reaction his invention got.“One of things we didn't expect was the
people working in the shop became quite attached to it.“When we had to pack it
up and put it back in the box one of them started crying.“It was good in a way,
because we thought the opposite would happen and they would feel threatened by
it because it was competing for their job.“In actual fact they thought it was
an enhancement because it was able to deal with frequent and boring requests,
like customers constantly asking where things are, which I think they found
quite helpful.”

When asked whether robots could
one day replace shop workers, Luisa Margiotta was sceptical. She added: “We find our customers love a
personal interaction and speaking to our staff is a big part of that.Our staff
members know our regulars very well and can have conversations on a daily a
basis, and I doubt robots would be able to fulfil this.It is possible, I
believe, that robots could assist with roles such as warehouse-based tasks, but
I doubt they will ever eliminate the need for human interaction.I am confident
there will be plenty of retail jobs available for people as and when they need
them in the future.”

Interesting
!~ yet cannot be taken as the final word on human / AI conflict.